Indianapolis is home track; victories there are special for Smoke

Tony Stewart loves to race and there's no place he loves to race more than Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

He has won twice at the iconic facility, located 55 miles from where he grew up.

Maybe the only thing better than a Brickyard 400 victory for Stewart would be one in the Indianapolis 500. But even he admits his days of racing an IndyCar are likely over.

The Brickyard 400 will have to be enough and every time he races there is a special event. Stewart, who has never won the Daytona 500 among his 48 Cup wins, will have good memories next week as the Sprint Cup Series heads to IMS to race July 28.

Stewart hopes he gets to kiss the bricks — a tradition done by the winner, started 17 years ago by Dale Jarrett — for a third time. He might even climb the fence again in celebration if he wins.

"It's definitely not just another victory to us. It's a big deal to us to win here," Stewart said.

"This is an event that I definitely circle on the schedule, emotionally have a lot invested in it. To us it's definitely not just another stop that's on the calendar and on the schedule. You don't just pull in and say, 'We're going to go in and try to win the race,' then pull out of here. When you're here, you're amped up because you're at Indianapolis."

He hopes to leave just as amped as he was his two previous victories. He first won at IMS in 2005, where maybe he was the most emotional ever after a win. He went on to capture the Cup title later that year.

He won again in 2007. Although he hadn't climbed fences at many of the other tracks after wins, he once again climbed the fence in addition to kissing the bricks at Indy after the victory, just as he had done in 2005.

"It was everything to me," Stewart said about the first time he kissed the bricks. "My whole life, since I was a kid, that's what I wanted to do. Not that I had some fascination with kissing bricks as a child. But my fascination to do it here was pretty obsessive."

Stewart has come up short the past five races at the Brickyard, but he has top-10 finishes in his past four starts.

Those were good finishes but Stewart likely left with disappointment, just as he had when he ran the Indianapolis 500. Stewart has five starts in the Indianapolis 500 with a career-best of fifth.

The memories of driving at 230 mph (as opposed to 180-190 mph) remain with him.

"The IndyCars, you were running faster speeds, but you had a lot more downforce in the car, too," Stewart said. "The first thing you did was get enough downforce on it to where you could run wide open around there.

"From that point, you tried to blend downforce and drag off the car and get to where you could stay wide open around the track."

So in some ways, even though he won twice in a stock car, he found an IndyCar easier at Indianapolis.

"The stock car, you have to lift (off the throttle), you have to use the brakes at the end of the frontstretch and backstretch," Stewart said.

"That adds another element of difficulty for it. It's a 3,400-pound car. It's a little more difficult I feel like in a stock car. It was a lot of fun running around here in the 230 mile-an-hour range in an IndyCar that you could run wide open."

So is Stewart a fan of stock cars at Indy? He is now, although he admits that when NASCAR first raced at the track in 1994, he was one of the traditionalists who didn't want stock cars racing at the facility.

"The first time they came, I'll be honest, I was 100 percent against it," Stewart said. "When you grow up in the state of Indiana, the Indianapolis Motor Speedway is the Holy Grail to you.

"I didn't want to see anything different come to it. To me, it was the Indy 500 and that's all it was supposed to be. But after … the second year, I was kind of on the fence, and by the third year I was a fan of it. Luckily my career path, it's allowed me to come race here every year."